Friday, July 06, 2012

Friday's Forgotten Books, July 6, 2012

Two weeks from today is Georges Simenon Day on FFB. Let me know if you would like to do a review of one of his works here if you don't have a blog.

Friday, October 12 will be Agatha Christie Day. (I will be away the two Fridays before that so I pushed it ahead a bit.)I am thinking of Ed McBain and Patricia Highsmith after that although I am open to a writer from another genre should he have a adequate back list for us.

The Assistant, Bernard Malamud

Malamud was certainly one of the favorite writers of my youth and this is my favorite of his novels. Although a good case can be made for the stories collected in THE MAGIC BARREL.

In this one, an elderly grocer is an anachronism in his neighborhood. Business is bad. After a robbery, he takes a fellow up on his offer to serve as his assistant. Frank is actually one of the robbers and his attempts to ameliorate his crime go astray when he becomes involved with the grocer's daughter.

This is a dark book. Its great strength lies in its portrait of a man wrestling with his inclination to do evil and its portrait of the Jewish community of the 1950s in New York City.

Although THE NATURAL probably won Malamud his fame, this book written in 1957 is just as satisfying without the supernatural elements.

Ed Gorman is the author of the Sam McCain and Dev Conrad series. He also writes short stories, westerns and edits anthologies. You can find him here.

Hard Man by Alan Guthrie

Allan Guthrie's Hard Man is actually a couple of books, both of them excellent. There's the storyline with Pearce, the Guthrie man we've met before, avenging the murder of his dog in a serio-comic (and occasionaly black comic) pursuit of a lunatic named Wallace. And then there's Edinburugh, the city where it's set, itself.

The violence of the story plays well against the violence of the city, which Guthrie manages to make seem much smaller than does Ian Rankin. This is because Guthrie and his multiple cast of characters all inhabit a very small psychological (if not physical) section of the city. If Rankin's cop is looking for something resembling truth, Guthrie's characters are looking for nothing more than satisfying the immediate needs of their rather amusingly diseased minds. Jim Thompson with the heebie-jeebies.

This is a quick, compelling novel that proves that Guthrie is as restless as his characters. I don't think he's a writer who'll settle for doing the same book over and over. This is a calculated and successful departure from his first two books. Interesting to speculate on what he'll do next. Harcourt/Otto Penzler

Patti--I will be doing an FFB for both the Simeonon and Christie weeks. I'm not sure which Simenon I'm going to do--I had a Maigret all written-up and then I read a couple of non-Maigrets that I really enjoyed--but for Christie I'm definitely going to write about ENDLESS NIGHT. I will email them to you a few days before the due date.

I still need to read THE ASSISTANT...THE MAGIC BARRELL was certainly my first book of his, and the collected or selected stories followed soon after. A number of the novels are still in various boxes, alas...likewise, I've read Guthrie short fiction, in CRIMEWAVE (iirc) and elsewhere, but no novels yet. So much ahead of us all, and time fidgets.

SHOT IN DETROIT

CONCRETE ANGEL

And this...

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” ― C.S. Lewis

Patricia (Patti) Abbott

Contact me

at aa2579@wayne.edu

About Me

Patricia Abbott is the author of more than 125 stories that have appeared online, in print journals and in various anthologies. She is the author of two print novels CONCRETE ANGEL (2015) and SHOT IN DETROIT (2016)(Polis Books). CONCRETE ANGEL was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity Award in 2016.